On 10 September 2026, two days after the Australian government announced a bill requiring platforms to offer users the choice of a feed without algorithmic recommendations, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, defended algorithmic ranking during an online press briefing with Australian journalists, without commenting on the bill itself. His argument: without the algorithm, the feed would be saturated by brands, companies and publishers, which post more often than creators and friends. For a company, that reasoning turns the usual story about organic reach on its head.
The facts
- On 8 September, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Communications Minister Anika Wells released for consultation a draft "Digital Duty of Care" bill that includes the "My Feed, My Way" initiative: platforms will have to send users over 16, new and existing, a notification asking them to choose their default feed, either with personalised recommendations or limited to the friends and creators they follow. Penalties of up to A$109.2 million, enforcement by the eSafety Commissioner, introduction to Parliament announced for this year, with no start date. A second strand targets, for under-18s, the addictive design features of apps, games and AI chatbots.
- On 10 September, Adam Mosseri spoke during an online press briefing with Australian journalists, held for the local launch of the "Algo Confessions" series and the "Your Algorithm" feature. A Meta spokesman had warned that he would not comment on the government's proposal; he gave his view on chronological feeds in general. According to ABC News, a chronological feed ends up overwhelmed by content from companies, brands and publishers: "Creators get drowned out, and then your friends get drowned out even more". According to The Guardian, the best way to get reach then becomes posting more often, and those who can afford to post the most are brands and companies, which post far more than creators, who in turn post far more than friends.
- Mosseri puts forward a drop in engagement of up to 50%, without providing data, ABC News notes. He points out that the chronological feed already exists on Instagram, in Australia as elsewhere, in the menu under the logo, but that it reverts to the algorithm every time the app is reopened; its adoption, by his estimate, sits in the low single-digit percentages, and he admits there is room to improve its discoverability. To The Guardian, he attributes the demand for a return to chronological order to a "very vocal minority", acknowledges that the algorithm "feels like a black box" and raises the possibility, in future, of talking to the app through Meta's AI models to understand why a piece of content appears.
- The same argument appears in a post Mosseri published on his own Instagram account in early September, before the Australian announcement, quoted by Social Media Today: without ranking, Instagram would become a "much less friend-oriented" place and one far more geared towards businesses and news publishers. The reasoning is not new: in August 2013, Facebook was already justifying the ranking of its feed by an average of 1,500 potential stories at every visit, and by a share of stories read that rose from 57% to 70% thanks to sorting.
Why does Mosseri's argument turn the advertisers' story on its head?
The usual line from advertisers fits in one sentence: the algorithm is killing organic reach. Mosseri says the opposite. Ranking holds back the accounts that post the most, and an unranked feed would mechanically hand the advantage to brands, because they can afford to post more often than any creator or individual. If your organic reach is falling, the cause may not be a technical mystery: you are the kind of publisher the ranking is designed to contain. In the current system, posting more fixes nothing; the quality of the signal (reading time, shares, saves, replies) weighs more than frequency.
The flaw in the reasoning was pointed out by The Next Web and by Social Media Today: Mosseri does not say that a chronological feed harms users, he says it produces less engagement and less time spent on the platform. That is precisely the outcome the Australian legislator is trying to obtain. His warning is unlikely to deter a government that is aiming to reduce screen time. For a European reader, part of the framework already exists: the Digital Services Act requires very large platforms, Instagram included since late August 2023, to offer at least one recommendation option not based on profiling (Article 38) and direct access to the choice between options (Article 27). Neither the European text nor the Australian draft imposes the chronological feed by default; Australia adds the notification and the explicit choice, which changes everything for adoption, as Mosseri himself acknowledges: whatever is not the default setting is almost never used.
The share of reach coming from followers, compared with the share coming from non-followers, is the metric to check account by account: it is the one that flips if a feed limited to followed accounts becomes a visible option, and Instagram provides it in the insights of professional accounts. The trade-off between organic and paid follows from it: if overall engagement in a market fell, the cost of paid attention there would move, and the social ads budget has to be read in that light. The direct relationship, newsletter, customer base, owned community, remains the only channel whose distribution does not depend on a setting that the platform, or tomorrow the user, can change. As of 11 September, neither the Australian government nor Meta has publicly reacted to Mosseri's remarks.
AIxH's view
This is the kind of shift our social media agency in Luxembourg watches for its clients: measuring where each account's reach really comes from, adjusting the rhythm and format of posts to what the platform rewards today, and building an owned audience alongside, with human editorial direction and AI-accelerated production. If your monthly reports do not separate reach from followers and reach from non-followers, a review of your accounts is enough to establish the measure before any change of rules.
